Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir

by Florence King

  I derived comfort from what I called “overness,” possibly because Herb’s Socratic dialogues always ended in such neat, inescapable conclusions. Thinking of him, I decided to write on “My Family.”

  My grandmother lives with us. She is my mother’s mother, but new people moving into our building always guess it wrong. They think my father is her son instead of her son-in-law because he’s so polite to her. When I didn’t catch a mother-in-law joke on the radio, Aunt Charlotte said it was because I never saw the kind of stuff that usually goes on between a man and his mother-in-law. Granny’s friends like my father, too. They are all Daughters. When they come to see her, he always tells them little things about history that they like. Tessie Satterfield, who brought me into this world, calls my father a prince among men. Jensy, the colored woman who works for us, says they broke the mold when they made my father. The librarians at Mount Pleasant all like him, too. All women like my father but he doesn’t have any men friends. I guess that’s because he’s so nice.

  I felt I could have done better if only I had not smelled. My arms had absorbed most of the chemical and reeked at the slightest movement; trying to contain it had affected my penmanship as well as my thoughts. When the bell rang I rushed into the girls room and washed myself wherever the raincoat had touched me, but the smell remained, at least in my imagination.

  I could not afford a lapse like this. I was used to being a pariah for flattering reasons, but now I was a real pariah and it made me feel vulnerable. Dimly I sensed that a female with a personality like mine has to make sure that she looks and smells good at all times, or as Henry Adams put it: “Those who study Greek must take pains with their dress.” So far I had kept the watery moles in a state of resentful awe, but if I stank, their mood would change to scorn and I would be powerless. Nobody cared how a loner boy smelled, but a girl who is a misanthrope must be nice to be near.

  The raincoat fiasco traumatized me so much that I did something completely out of character: I took Granny’s long-ignored advice on ladylike graciousness and tried to be friendly.

  The object of my sudden warmth was a late enrollee named Harriet Mudd, who stalked into homeroom the next morning and thrust her card at Miss Ogilvy. She had muscular shoulders, thick glasses, and tiny black eyes with an odd bright shine. Her complexion was taupe and her demeanor grim.

  “I’m afraid all the lockers have been assigned, Harriet,” said Miss Ogilvy, “but I’m sure one of the girls would be happy to share hers with you.” She turned to us. “Do I have a volunteer?”

  Every female hand in the room shot up. All the Virginless American dynamos were eager to practice goodness without clout. It felt strange not being the only one with my hand down, but this sort of thing happens to the best of us. Ann Hopkins was waving her arm frantically and I nearly tore mine out of its socket as I hacked desperately at the air near Miss Ogilvy’s face.

  “All right, Florence, thank you. Please take Harriet out in the hall and show her your combination.”

  I rose triumphantly and gave Harriet a bright smile. Her face remained immobile. I told myself she was just shy. As I worked the combination lock, she seemed to be listening for a click like safecrackers in the movies; her eyes, minuscule to begin with, turned into mere pinpoints. She reached into her sacklike purse for a small black notebook, wrote down the combination, then replaced the notebook with a swift, secretive gesture. She uttered not a word the whole time but I looked on her silence as a challenge to my newly acquired charm. I would soon have those taupe toes curling.

  She spoke her first sentence to me at three-fifteen that afternoon when I tried to put a book on the locker shelf.

  “You touch this locker again and I’ll kill you.”

  I looked around; she couldn’t possibly be talking to me—this sort of thing never happened to gracious ladies who made everybody happy. But there was no one else in the hall; I was alone with my new friend. She grabbed my books off the shelf and threw them at me.

  “My Pop was a war hero,” she growled. “He drove a tank for Patton. He killed lots of people and he showed me and my brother how to do it. You smear axle grease on an icepick and stick it straight in their heart. When you pull it back out, the grease seals the hole so it don’t show and the doctor thinks you died of something natural.”

  She dipped into her haversack and pulled out an evil-looking pointed instrument and a can stamped WESTERN AUTO STORES.

  “That’s for you if you don’t stay away from this locker.”

  She slammed the door shut and jerked her head toward the stairs, taking no chances that I would sneak back and open it after she was gone. I decided not to argue with her. A girl who called her father Pop was capable of anything. I descended the stairs, my spine crawling at the sound of her ponderous tread behind me.

  Peg and Helen were waiting for me outside.

  “Why are you taking all those books home?”

  “Er, I have a lot of homework.”

  “Already? It’s only the second day of school.”

  I almost told them about the death threat but I hated to publicize my defeats, especially one I had volunteered for. How would it look if I admitted to a falling out with my new lockermate after only five hours? Even the chronically unpopular took longer than that to get a feud going, and this was more than a feud. Needing time to think, I brushed off their questions and changed the subject to one guaranteed to absorb us all the way home: pubic hair.

  I spent the evening with the story on the tip of my tongue. Each time I almost told it, I considered the consequences and stopped. I could not tell Granny. An uncomprehending veteran of my social wars, she would only say, “What did you do to the poor child to upset her so?” I could not tell Herb. He was for good news, like report cards. There was something almost sacrilegious about the idea of going to Herb for help in this sort of crisis; it would have been a travesty, like using a fine linen napkin to wash a car. Herb was a luxury, like Ashley, and the situation clearly called for a necessity.

  That meant Mama, but I did not see how she could rescue me this time. Harriet was not a teacher or a tombstone but a girl my age, and Mama could not move in on a kid, even a monster kid. Besides, in a funny way I was afraid that if she met Harriet they would take a liking to each other. After all, they were both loaded for bear; I had a fleeting fantasy of the two of them going out on a rampage together and having a grand old time. The knowledge that they were sisters under the skin was painful, like having a brother whom Mama loved better than me. While Harriet was not a boy, she was much closer to being one than I was, so she loomed in my mind as the son Mama had wanted.

  That night I lay in bed reviewing my options. The most direct solution, guaranteed to please Mama, was to beat Harriet up. There were two holes in this approach that no amount of axle grease could close. First, although I was taller, Harriet was much stronger; it would be no exaggeration to describe her figure as burly. Second, how could I, with my long history of peer problems, walk into junior high on the third day of school and start slamming the new girl around for no apparent reason? When the dust settled I would, of course, reveal my reason, but how would it sound? “She threatened to stick an icepick in my heart.” Who would believe it? Harriet would only deny it. A search of her haversack would bear me out, but that solution was flawed, too. Violent people invariably have an animal shrewdness that I knew I lacked. Somewhere between the fray and the principal’s office Harriet, like Lizzie Borden, would find some way to get rid of her incriminating weapon, leaving me holding the icepickless and greaseless bag.

  A quieter solution was to tell Miss Ogilvy in private, but that would bring me up against the same credibility problem. Teachers are old hands at childish hyperbole. “She threatened to stick an icepick in your heart?” “Yes, ma’am.” If I had known Miss Ogilvy better she might—I say might—have believed me, but after only three days? No. Not in 1947. Schools were peaceful places in those days.

  My third option was to call Harriet
’s bluff, but having looked into those glittering peppercorns that passed for eyes, I didn’t dare risk it. She might stab me. I was afraid of her but more afraid of what she represented. Like all members of the shabby genteel class, I hated low-class people. Being a shabby genteel Southerner only intensified this prejudice; we are bottomless wells of aristocratic disdain and empty thimbles of aristocratic power. All we can do is badmouth poor white trash.

  For the remaining days of that week I carried my books everywhere. Nobody paid any attention; I was always carrying books. As long as the weather stayed warm I could count on not being noticed, but what would happen if I started carrying a coat around I did not know.

  By happy chance I never found out. My problem was solved suddenly and permanently on Saturday morning when Granny opened the newspaper and uttered a cry of despair.

  “Oh, the poor little soul! Did you know a girl named Harriet Mudd? It says she went to your school.”

  Her past tenses were music to my ears. I jumped up and read over her shoulder.

  BRONZE STAR WINNER AND FAMILY

  KILLED IN COLLISION WITH TRAIN;

  SUICIDE RULED

  Cumberland, Md.—A speeding B&O freight train took the lives of Albert J. Mudd, his wife, and their two children Friday night when the decorated 3rd Army veteran drove onto the tracks here. Witnesses said Mudd, who had been under psychiatric care at Walter Reed Hospital, shouted “Here I come, Georgie!” and crashed through a lowered signal bar in an apparently deliberate attempt to end his life.

  The story went on to list the names and schools of Harriet and her brother. It was true. Somebody Up There liked me.

  “Did you know her?” Granny asked sorrowfully.

  “Just a little,” I said, struggling to keep a grievous expression on my face.

  “Mudd …” she said pensively. “That’s an old Maryland name. Was she descended from that doctor who was involved in the Lincoln assassination?”

  “She could have been.”

  In homeroom on Monday morning, Ann Hopkins, who had already lectured me on the need to show boys how deep the waters of womanly emotion ran, burst into tears and simulated a fainting spell. That the boys looked distinctly uncomfortable escaped her notice. Miss Ogilvy, no believer in letting students verbalize their finer feelings, insisted on an immediate end to the display and called for a constructive response.

  “Flowers!” Ann sobbed. “We have to send flowers!”

  “That would be appropriate,” said Miss Ogilvy. She looked around in that way teachers have when they are getting ready to appoint a volunteer. My hand was down but now there was a clear logic to her choice.

  “Florence, since you were Harriet’s lockermate, would you take up a collection and stop by the florist’s this afternoon?”

  I went up and down the aisles gathering nickels and dimes, my smile muscles aching from suppression. When I had all the money together, we voted on what kind of flowers to send. It should have been over then, but Ann Hopkins still had some more womanly feeling to let out.

  “Miss Ogilvy, I think Florence should lead us in prayer.”

  Miss Ogilvy handed me the Bible and I read the Twenty-third Psalm, all the while thinking that the death of the Mudd family was the greatest event in the history of genetics since Mendel crossed his peas. I was in a state of delirious joy the whole day, but I had to hide it. All the girls went round with dolorous faces and spent lunch hour talking in hushed tones about what a wonderful person Harriet had been. None of them chose to remember that they had known her for only four days, and that during this time she had not even said hello to them. They competed with each other to deliver the most moving testimonial to her basic sweetness; what she was really like, “deep down” and “inside” and “in her heart.” Each girl knew how warm and friendly Harriet had been, and I, who did know, had to keep quiet.

  By lunch hour the next day, the Legend of Harriet Mudd had sprung up like a Nashville hit. It was the human comedy, female version; being unable to find the essential goodness in Harriet was an admission that there was no goodness in oneself, so all the girls in our homeroom related tender little stories about her: some thoughtful favor she had done them, something sweet she had said to them, a cute joke she had told. And I, to whom she had spoken as Cato to Carthage, had to keep quiet.

  Do you think that’s all I had to endure? Read on with me, the best is yet to be. When I got home that afternoon, Granny was wearing her good black hat.

  “Change into your church dress, we’re going to pay a call at the funeral parlor. I’ve invited Mrs. Bell to go with us.”

  The caskets were closed, of course, so Mrs. Bell did not have a very good time. It was a shame, because she would have been the ideal person to help me realize my fantasy of folding Harriet’s taupe fingers around an icepick. Picturing the scene in my mind, I doubled over and Granny patted my shaking shoulders, so I had to pretend I was crying.

  The other mourners were extremely fat women with mean mouths and red-faced men with little pieces of toilet paper stuck on razor nicks. Granny gave them a dubious glance.

  “These people look right trashy to me but we must pay our respects.”

  “We’re all equal in death,” said Mrs. Bell.

  Granny was so pleased by my show of womanly grief that she added an extra dollar to her share of my allowance that week. Of far greater value was the lesson I learned from the whole ungodly mess: I never again tried to make myself liked.

  »seven«

  I SPENT only a year at Powell. District of Columbia schools were segregated and the city’s black population was growing, so in the spring of 1948 when I was finishing the seventh grade, the school board transferred Powell to the black system. The white Powellites were assigned to Central High, which was renamed Central Junior–Senior High. It was at 11th and Clifton, so Peg, Helen, and I rode the streetcar down.

  I started French in the eighth grade. It came as easily to me as math came hard, and salved my Henry Adams complex by providing me with an automatic femininity. Merely by adding an e to adjectives and reflexive verbs, I could establish myself as female without following any of Granny’s rules.

  Herb was delighted with my prowess.

  “I knew you had a good ear. It was just destined to come out in a non-musical way.”

  “Tu es gentil de me dire cela.”

  “We don’t need any foreigners around here,” Granny said.

  “Hinky-dinky parlay-voo,” Mama sang.

  It was in French class that I noticed a dull ache in the small of my back. When the bell rang and I stood up, I was aware of a moisture that told me Nature had added an e to the seat of my pants. I told Granny when I got home and her eyes lit in ecstasy. I knew what she was thinking: now I would stop reading books and win my Evelyn Cunningham spurs. She was dying to inspect my first production, so into the bathroom we went.

  She had been waiting for it all that year and had sanitary belt and Junior Kotex warming up under the sink like a gangster’s getaway car in front of a bank. She produced them now with a join-the-club eagerness that filled me with a sense of defeat. I did not want this kind of femininity; effluvia might be Granny’s womanly signature but French was mine.

  I developed bad cramps, so she put me to bed and gave me a hot water bottle and a hot toddy. Her favorite Southern scenario was complete. I had taken to my bed of pain with female trouble.

  “I have something for you to read,” she said softly.

  Half-drunk, I looked at her in disbelief. That’s when she gave me the clipping. Herb read it the next day.

  “Mrs. Ruding, I fear this is blasphemous. Adam began as dust, Eve as a rib, but you are a star-strewn vicissitude.”

  “Be that as it may.”

  I won the French medal at ninth-grade graduation the following year, but my triumph passed unnoticed because Central had by that time become the eye of a racial storm. It was the Powell business all over again. In the spring of 1950 the school board turned Central over
to the black system, causing that foremost native Washingtonian and Central alumnus J. Edgar Hoover to go up in smoke. Other Central alumni, including several very prominent men, joined the fray and the fight was on. The city became what is now known as “racially tense” and rumors new—the white boys were arming, the colored boys were arming, the Southern congressmen on the District Committee were “in touch” with the Klans in their home states. Finally a radio station received an anonymous phone call from someone who threatened to dynamite the school rather than let the blacks have it.

  “What do you think of it?” the streetcar driver asked me.

  “I don’t think of it,” I replied coldly.

  I was reading The Fountainhead while a race riot brewed. The awkward age is the worst time to read Ayn Rand. She liked people to be tall, slim, and beautiful, and I was now slouched, dumpy, and pustular, but I took up Objectivism anyway. Dominique Francon seemed like the perfect solution to the Henry Adams goddess shortage. The purity of her vision made her a Virgin, yet she was undeniably the Venus of the granite quarry, so I looked for ways to imitate her.

  I stopped walking and started striding, taking care to turn my flat feet inward so I would look like an egoist instead of a duck. I kept my eyes locked straight ahead, causing myself a number of collisions and falls. I forced my jaw into a rational clamp, which broke the rubber bands on my braces and made me dribble down my front. In the name of individualism I quit Le Cercle Français. I longed to quit organizations right and left, but unfortunately, French Club was the only one I had ever joined. I gave some thought to ending my friendships, but having only two, it did not seem worthwhile. The architect who had designed Central was dead, so I could not help him blow up the school, and there was no way to locate the mad bomber, who in any case was probably not an idealist in the Howard Roark mold.